Vrije U. Amsterdam, School of Business and Economics, Netherlands
During the past years, research has moved towards a more nuanced rationalization of diversity initiatives in organizations and developed better explanations for when such initiatives work as intended. What received less attention is the more descriptively oriented puzzle on how diversity as a system of categories of difference might co-vary with other ongoing organizational processes. Relying on an inductive study in the higher education sector in India and the Netherlands, we offer the view that changes in institutional logics can trigger reactions of an organization’s members that impact diversity and its associated categories of difference via professional identity work. While diversity work in organizations is often seen as a trigger of tensions, our paper highlights –through theory development supported by illustrative empirical data – that diversity can also be understood as an outcome of tensions stemming from other organizational processes not explicitly aimed at diversity. Our findings have implications for diversity scholarship and for scholarship on conflict and change in organizations more generally.
